While David was thus playing, and Pepper showing a fearful broadside of ivory teeth, and flinging up his nose and sympathizing loudly and with a long face, though not perhaps so deeply as he looked, suddenly rang behind David a chorus of human chuckles.  David wheeled, and there were six young women’s faces set in the foliage and laughing merrily.  Though perfectly aware that David would look round, they seemed taken quite by surprise when he did look, and with military precision became instantly two files, for the four impudent ones ran behind the two modest ones, and there, by an innocent instinct, tied their cap-strings, which were previously floating loose, their custom ever in the early morning.

“Play us up something merry, sir,” hazarded one of the mock-modest ones in the rear.

“Shan’t I be taking you from your work?” objected David dryly.

“Oh, all work and no play is bad for the body,” replied the minx, keeping ostentatiously out of sight.

Good-natured David played a merry tune in spite of his heart; and even at that disadvantage it was so spirit-stirring compared with anything the servants had heard, it made them all frisky, of which disposition Tom, the stable boy, who just then came into the yard, took advantage, and, leading out one of the housemaids by the polite process of hauling at her with both hands, proceeded to country dancing, in which the others soon demurely joined.

Now all this was wormwood to poor David; for to play merriment when the heart is too heavy to be cheered by it makes that heart bitter as well as sad.  But the good-natured fellow said to himself:  “Poor things, I dare say they work from morning till night, and seldom see pleasure but at a distance; why not put on a good face, and give them one merry hour.”  So he played horn-pipes and reels till all their hearts were on fire, and faces red, and eyes glittering, and legs aching, and he himself felt ready to burst out crying, and then he left off.  As for il penseroso Pepper, he took this intrusion of merry music upon his sympathies very ill.  He left singing, and barked furiously and incessantly at these ancient English melodies and at the dancers, and kept running from and running at the women’s whirling gowns alternately, and lost his mental balance, and at last, having by a happier snap than usual torn off two feet of the under-housemaid’s frock, shook and worried the fragment with insane snarls and gleaming eyes, and so zealously that his existence seemed to depend on its annihilation.

David gave those he had brightened a sad smile, and went hastily in-doors.  He put his violin into its case, and sealed and directed his letter to Eve.  He could not rest in-doors, so he roamed out again, but this time he took care to go on the lawn.  Nobody would come there, he thought, to interrupt his melancholy.  He was doomed to be disappointed in that respect.  As he sat in the little summer-house with his head on the table, he suddenly heard an elastic step on the dry gravel.  He started peevishly up and saw a lady walking briskly toward him:  it was Miss Fountain.